Friday, 6 November 2015

Interview with Nigel Quinlan

I just finished reading Maloney’s Magical Weatherbox by Nigel Quinlan
and it’s such a funny, original, wacky adventure that I had to track down the
author for an interview. So, welcome, Nigel!

The beginning is probably a good place to start. What are your early
memories of reading and/or writing?

Family myth has me as a small child too young for school reading the
words 'CAR PARK' while sitting in a car with my granny. An aunt refused to
believe this and took me around a shop and asked me to read all the signs,
which I did. I don't remember that, but I do remember my Mum getting me my
first books, which were Secret Seven books by Enid Blyton. Later there were the
Famous Five, The Hardy Boys, Nancy Drew, Rosemary Sutcliffe, Joan Aiken, CS
Lewis and lots of others. The Star Wars novelisatons made a big impact long,
long before I ever saw any of the films, and The Hobbit blew my tiny mind just
before I started secondary school.

My first attempts at writing turned out to be efforts at mimicking Enid
Blyton, but Mum claims my oldest story is about two chickens who rob a bank,
and she says she still has it somewhere. We had a mobile bank which visited
every Friday, so I think the chickens just drove off with it. We also had a
mobile library that visited every second Monday. I kept careful track of the days
and must have been the only child in Ireland that hated bank holidays for
throwing the visits off. I don't think the chickens ever had designs on the
library, but I'd have cheerfully made off with it if I could have.

Maloney's Magical Weatherbox is such an original premise.
Where did the idea come from?

What happened was some friends of mine told me a story of how they'd all
decided to squeeze into a phone box together to see if they would all fit. They
didn't. I made a joke about them destroying the phone box, and that put the
idea in my head. Not about the Maloneys or the Seasons or the Shieldsmen or
anything like that, just the phone box blowing up. Then I had to come up with a
reason for the phone box to explode, so I invented everything else, like a
chain reaction getting out of hand. Ideas kept exploding and going off in all
directions. Getting all the ideas to line up as some sort of story was the big
challenge. The Weatherbox itself is based on the phone box that used to stand
in my home village of Murroe. My Dad had a garage and petrol station, and we
used to get lots of truck and lorry drivers stopping there for one reason or
another, and that's where Ed Wharton came from. I knew eco-warriors who
protested the motorway expansion in the Glen of The Downs in Co Wicklow. We
used to take Chinese take-away up to them, and that's where the Shieldsmen came
from. There are probably other more-or-less direct connections, but a lot of
the ideas evolved considerably over revisions, so explanations would be laborious.
Most of the landscape and, indeed, the weather, came from what was around me
growing up in Murroe.

Yes indeed. One of my favourite things about the book is its 'local'
setting. Excluding the Dublin chapters, it's very much a small Irish town/parish
book, and the 'Irishness' of the story shines strongly throughout. Considering
your publishers are from the UK, did you have any difficulty keeping it as
Irish as it is? Were there any particular Irish turns of phrases, words or
ideas that they didn't understand?

Both the US and the UK publishers were pretty keen on the setting and
the voice, so I didn't have to change much. There was a bit of low-level
swearing and cursing that had to be modified - Liz uttered the odd 'feck' here
and there - but that was due to age considerations. I think it was at the
copy-editing stage that some of the colloquialisms got changed, because
grammatically speaking they're perfectly terrible, but I generally got them
changed back. I wanted Liz and Neil to say 'and me' instead of 'and I,' as in:
'Liz and me ran down the hill chased by the whirlwind,' so I had to keep a
sharp eye out for that. They didn't bat an eye at the bits in Irish, even. I
did originally have the Shieldsmen in the van singing 'The Boys Of Fair Hill,'
and was firmly advised to pick another song. That was probably because of the
drisheens. Or cribeens.

And how did you find the whole editing process with your publishers?

With the publishers, it was a dream. I'd already been through the
revision mill with my agent, Jenny Savill and the formidable readers of the
Andrew Nurnberg Agency. They took the book apart and I put it back together
again several times before it was accepted by Orion and Roaring Brook Press,
meaning it was at a pretty advanced stage by the time it reached my editors'
desks. Still, what they got was the merely the definitive First Draft, no
matter how many drafts I may have imagined passing through my computer files,
and after that came the second, third and fourth and so on. Amber Carraveo in
the UK and Kate Jacobs in the US actually worked together to produce a single
set of edits between them, and they only really diverged in minor ways towards
the end with the copy edits and the proofs. I was inured to huge plot and scene
overhauls by that stage and responded to some of their suggestions by
completely redrafting part one, and had to be told to rein it in a bit. Once I
realised that the edits, though numerous, were relatively small, I settled into
it easily enough. There was edit after edit, with the edits becoming fewer but
knottier as I went along, but Kate and Amber were unfailingly kind and
supportive.

Another lovely thing about the book is the Maloney family unit. They
work as a team and are kind and supportive of each other. Is the family based
on your own? What do your own family think of the book?

They weren't especially based on my family - the personalities of the
Maloneys don't map to the personalities of the Quinlans at all, really. I grew
up in a big family, and it was loud and rambunctious and everyone tended to
pull together when they needed to. You were part of this big gang, and that
gang got even bigger when we teamed up with our cousins. Sometimes I look at
the Maloneys and wonder if they're a wee bit idealised, but then I recall that
Neil and Liz are only just entering adolescence. Family dynamics tend to get
more frantic when the hormones start to flow. My family seems to like the book,
on the whole, or that's what they tell me. I'm particularly pleased that my
nieces and nephews who are at just the right age seem to like it. My older
son, Eddie, read one of the proofs when they were sent to me and told his mum
he was amazed at how good it was. Then he clapped me on the shoulder and said
'My dad the writer' in an approving voice.

Do you have a writing routine? Where, when and how (pencil or PC?) do
you write? Do you have any writing rituals or habits you abide by?

At this point I've had more writing routines than I've had hot dinners.
I devise new writing routines and rites and customs and rituals and
constitutional amendments every other hour, apparrently, in search of the
magical alignment of place and time and snacks and bodily configuration that
will allow me to write. I stand, I sit, I lie at desks on floors, halfway up
stairs, in cafes and libraries and gardens. I use notebooks, journals, macs,
laptops, PCs and small sticks dipped in paint. Somewhere in the midst of all
this nonsense, I get some writing done. Actually, things have settled down
lately, and I'm keeping it old school, with a desk, a chair, a flask of coffee
and a laptop, just like Dickens used to have. I do love writing stuff longhand,
but have had to face the stark reality that my handwriting is utterly
unreadable, and typing it up was going to cause me permanent physical damage as
I broke every ergonomic law in the books twisting and turning and bending
myself in knots in an effort to interpret my own scrawl. Now I just use my
notebooks to scribble cryptic little notes to myself that I read later and
can't understand. 'Burgle the fish walker.' What the hell?

Your favourite books/authors?

This can be a bit of a movable feast, but here we go

Dorothy Dunnett

Dorothy Dunnett- author of the Lymond Chronicles, about a 17th century Scottish
adventurer, the House Of Niccolo about a Renaissance banker from Bruges, King
Hereafter, based on the premise that the Scottish Macbeth and the Viking
Thorfinn were one and the same and the Johnson Johnson Mysteries, about a spy
with a yacht. Her historical novels are mesmerising. Witty, delicate writing,
astonishing historical detail, fascinating characters, and plotting that is
devious and clever and often brutal. Dunnett was a bit of a gateway drug for me
to more historical fiction, but though I've read lots of great historical
fiction as a result, none of them have the combination of epic scope and
literary style, with all the romance, intrigue and action that Dunnett has.
Patrick O'Brian might be almost as good, but I find his novels, though lovely,
get a bit repetitive.

CJ Cherryh - I think I may have more books by Cherryh than I do of any
other individual author. I've loved her since I first read her Morgaine Trilogy
- a fantasy epic with a science fictional premise, with her doomed and cursed
protagonist and her fanatically loyal sidekick closing destructive gates
through time and space regardless of the damage inflicted on the world the gate
is on. Incredible writing style and densely psychological tight first-person
POVs are her hallmark. Most of her other books tend to be hard science fiction
set in her Merchanter/Union universe, tough-as-nails, unsentimental but
emotionally tortuous space operas of secrets and lies and uncertain agendas and
divided loyalties. Cherryh is downright addictive.

Peter Straub - when I was reading lots of horror, Straub was one of my
favourites. Ghost Story and Shadowlands were wonderfully weird, formless,
evocative, dreamlike nightmares, but it's the Blue Rose Trilogy that still
stands up. Straub removed the overtly supernatural element from his work, which
pushed his plotting and storytelling skills to a whole new level. His writing
remains gorgeous, but Koko, Mystery and The Throat are as tightly plotted as
they are intricate and epic tales of murder and blood-stained history. These
are utterly captivating and compelling novels of mystery and suspense.

Other writers I love:

JRR Tolkein - I pretty much lived in Middle earth for all of my teenage years.

Ursula LeGuin - I just reread the Earthsea Trilogy, and they really are incredible books.

Alan Garner - I don't think his first two books hold up so well, but nearly everything else he's written is astonishing.

Flann O'Brien - At Swim Two Birds and The Third Policemen are both profoundly brilliant works of literature and of fantasy. long with Shirley Jackson he's one of the great touchstones of 20-21st century fantasy.

Wow, that's a comprehensive list. Can I ask if there will be more
adventures from the Maloney family? If not, what are you working on now? Or is
it top secret?

What I'm working on is not a sequel, though it is a similar sort of
comic fantasy adventure set in an unusually horrible and miserable Irish
village. I'm waiting for edits on that, so I'd better not say too much about it
as it all might change completely in the next draft. I hope we haven't seen the
last of the Maloneys. If nothing else I'd like to think I might do some short
stories with them or with some of the members of the supporting cast. I think
Owen and the Hags and Ed Wharton and Neetch should have a few adventures of
their own.

We'll look
forward to seeing these in the future. Thank you Nigel, for doing this
interview for Middle Grade Strikes Back, and continued success to you and your
writing.

Great questions,
Kieran, thank you.

The Maloneys' Magical
Weatherbox features not only Maloneys, magic and a Weatherbox, it's also got
tourists, hags, Shieldsmen, bog-beasts, nasty old Fitgeralds, mysterious things
in lakes and terrifying elementals! In other words, exactly the sorts of things
you'd expect to turn up and make life difficult for Neil and Liz Maloney when
one of their Seasons goes missing. Can they protect the Weatherbox and get the
Seasons on schedule again? It's only the end of the world if they don't!

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We are a group of UK based writers and bloggers who have one important thing in common - we are passionate about middle grade fiction.

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